Sent off to find a missing noble. How the hell is it that happens so often anyway? You'd think they could at least keep an eye on where their kids are. But no, some privileged brat goes missing every other week and a bunch of reckless maniacs have to try and find them. This time it's Andrej Wands, gone and vanished with his girlfriend in some podunk hamlet up the way.

Getting there was in all likelihood going to be easy. Or would've been apart from being charged by a chattering pack of kobolds - who promptly hid behind the party and cowered in fear from the other problem. The quartet of dire wolves chasing them.

This being as said a group of reckless maniacs the the wolves were soon either vanished, or burned to a crisp, or in one case just laying there while its brains leak out of its ears into a puddle.

Suffice to say after the display you lot put on the kobolds are cheering, apparently entirely non-hostile, and probably more than willing to chat if one is so inclined to attempt communicating in either Common or Draconic. They don't exactly look like they're geniuses, mind. One of them is after all licking his finger after dipping it in the brain puddle. Two more are poking the ground where that last wolf sunk into the earth as if by magic with spears even though it's clearly doing them no good. Maybe one of the other five is intelligent enough to hold a productive conversation?

Kathryn leaves the others to try and decipher whatever it is that the kobolds have to say. Inspecting the wolves, she finds that one of the three has a reasonably intact - which is to say, non-singed - pelt, and pulls out her hunting knife and goes to work skinning the beast.

Because killing things and bringing back their body parts is her day job.

Once Kat is done skinning them, Julia packs her library edition of "Draconic for Dummies" into an old stocking and goes to work on claiming as much of the wolf meat as she possibly can. While roughly communicating with the kobolds, she manages to stuff a couple barrels worth in her gut, nary a change in her figure, and packs a little extra into her haversack for later.

((I may not have it in me to run on Monday. I've got to go kill one of my cats earlier that day, and I may be nowhere even remotely close to up to it at that point. I'll either show up or I won't, I don't think I can even come close to trying to predict this.))

As of today I now have work in the morning on Tuesdays. I'm not calling anything off, but I am setting a hard closing time of midnight eastern at the latest. Eleven if things are shaping up that it works out that way.